Happens all the time in action shows; so often, in fact, that it makes one wonder how these guys ever passed muster (heck, even survived long enough) for assignment to an elite military or security force if they drop like mayflies in every tactical situation.

Please note: this Trope is actually very inaccurate when you compare it toReal Life. If you were to watch every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, count the number of casualties that the Enterprise had, and then compare that to an actual military, you'd see that Kirk's record as a leader in this regard is excellent, far better than any general in U.S. history. Even war heroes like George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower had proportionately more casualties among their troops.note It has been suggested that it would be more appropriate to compare Kirk's casualty rate to units on exploratory, rather than combat, missions. It must be remembered that the Enterprise under Kirk's command participated in multiple combat missions against warships with superior weaponry (such as in the episodes "Balance of Terror" and "The Doomsday Machine" to name a few.

This is sometimes justified by the idea that the doomed Red Shirts are actually quite competent, especially in other areas, but they've never had any formal training in how to fight beings that can kill them simply if you look at them funny. In other words, take The Worf Effect and apply it to an entire military.

Also: A Red Shirt that has, through luck, moxie, or through the endearment of the fanbase may become a Mauve Shirt...clothed in the most powerful of Plot Armor. The Mauve Shirt will often accompany the army as their leader or representative...and generally makes it out alive. That is, until the Plot Armor wears off.

Note for Tropers: Redshirt Army specifically deals with easily-killed good guys. If you want easily-killed bad guys, see Mooks.

Examples:

The Marines, despite antagonizing the protagonists, who are pirates, are full of people who legitimately want to make the world a safer place, Knight TemplarWell-Intentioned Extremist members aside. However, they are mostly victims of The Worf Effect, and by the time of the Paramount War arc, anyone who isn't a member of the admiralty can get swept aside with ease.

Don Krieg's armada consisted of 50 ships and 5,000 men. While this might have been an impressive force in East Blue, they were nothing but cannon fodder by the standards of the Grand Line. All but 100 of them were wiped out by one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea, Dracule Mihawk. Note that Mihawk does not have a crew; it was just Mihawk. And he destroyed them because he was bored.

The whole of the Earth Sphere Federation forces in Gundam 00: A Wakening of the Trailblazer. In their defense, they were outnumbered 10,000-to-1. Nobody's going to do particularly well with those odds.

The rebel group Katharon of Mobile Suit Gundam 00 looks like the AEUG to the A-Laws Titans, except that the AEUG had great mechas and pilots while the Katharon go into battle with mechas that where useless in the previous season that takes place four years ago. Their only purpose is to momentarily distract the A-Laws while Celestial Beings does all the actual fighting. You have to wonder why they even bother if all they do is die.

Briefly subverted when A-Laws brings out anti-beam smoke. Even the mighty 00 is hampered by its reliance on beam weapons and it falls to Katharon and their obsolete solid guns to pull CB out of a tight spot. Fortunately for them A-Laws relied heavily on beam weapons too.

In the first season of Mobile Suit Gundam 00, anyone who ever pilots an AEU-MS are automatically members of the Redshirt Army. During the battle in Moralia, there were more than 200 Hellions and several brand-new Enacts. The survivors ran away when the Gundam Meisters had slain about 200 soldiers in minutes.

Mazinger Z: In the last Go Nagai manga arc, the Japanese army created the Mazinger army -a squad of mass-production, piloted Mazingers- to try and defeat Big Bad Dr. Hell once and for all. However, as Kouji was performing test flights with the Jet Scrander, Dr. Hell threw a massive attack involving several mobile fortresses and several dozens of Mechanical Beasts. Main character, Love Interest and Battle Couple Sayaka Yumi and the Mazinger army flew to meet the Hell's army. The entire army but one got annihilated, and you will never guess who was the single survivor. Sayaka. The Mazinger army reappeared in Mazinkaiser, and all of them were quickly destroyed and killed by the Mykene empire army. Only Tetsuya and Jun survived, and only Tetsuya put out a good, actual fight.

In Berserk any army that doesn't have a main or plot important character in it is dead meat. There's also what happened to a lot of the Hawk's Raiders whenever the Hawks went up against an Apostle. Or what happened to nearly everyone in the entire Band when the Eclipse went down.

It's easy to believe the band of the Hawk consists of only Guts, Caska, Griffith and the Raiders. Their actual numbers are somewhere around 5,000 men, but all focus is put on the former mentioned members.

Any friendly force in a Humongous Mecha series that isn't equipped with Humongous Mecha. (The AD Police in the Bubble Gum CrisisOVAs count here, despite the fact that they had mecha — the mecha they had were the mass-produced tin-can-death-trap variety.) If all the main characters have unique mecha, then any friendly force that does have mecha but only has one or two different models that qualify. For example, the allied armies in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann are simply cannon fodder.

Ditto Paradigm City's Military Police forces in The Big O. The lone ones that don't give up by the finale and actually try to join the fight on Roger's side get vaporized in fairly short order. This actually becomes a plot point in season two. The commissioner is shown many times to be struggling with the fact that he and his men are almost completely useless against the giant robot-threats that keep popping up everywhere. Its also indicated that this inferiority complex was the reason he was so hostile toward Big O in season one.

And the Japanese Strategic Self-Defense Forces in Neon Genesis Evangelion (which are also prone to Five Rounds Rapid); in fact, all portrayals of the JSDF in anime. On the other hand, they do learn after a while and only use remote control missile barrages, and those are usually just distractions.

...or in kaiju movies (e.g. Godzilla) either, for that matter, where any reference to the necessary reality that there are people inside all the tanks and jets being uselessly thrown at the monsters (and by extension, the sanity of continuing to order such futile engagements) is the exception rather than the rule.

Subverted in early episodes of Kotetsushin Jeeg, however. The JSDF display competent tactics in their battle against Himika'sPhantom Gods, and although Jeeg spearheads their attacks, he can't do it alone.

Gasaraki also subverts this with the JSDF having a unit of mechs with the protagonist piloting the same suit as his squad mates. Even though he is a little more skilled at it none of them are pushovers.

All of the soldiers stationed in the castle at the beginning of Murder Princess are easily wiped out by a bunch of trolls and a Tyke Bomb mechanical doll.

Both the unpowered human soldiers of the Hellsing organization and their Wild Geese mercenary replacements fall into this, being near-useless against the enemy vampires in close range (to their credit, the Wild Geese were well-aware of it and took pains to engage the vampires at long-range, but unfortunately were unable to keep it up). The ghouls fall into this category as well since they are little more than vampire-controlled, mindless zombies.

They may not wear red, but the generic Combat Mages of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha have a tendency to get mowed down whenever they encounter the current villain's main forces. They're pretty good at keeping Mecha-Mooks at bay though, and they were able to contain the Wolkenritter until their Mysterious Protector appeared. In their defense, the main villains of the series are way out of their league. They're essentially cops, and you expect them to be able to take on an insane and insanely powerful mage (albeit with a bit of an Informed Ability), One-Man Army magic knights from an Artifact of Doom and a Mad Scientist and his super-powered cyborg minions and countless attack drones.

The Magical Teachers and Students in Mahou Sensei Negima! during the Mahora Fair arc were woefully unprepared for the fight… so Negi cons the entire student body into making a second Redshirt Army for this fight.

The Tower of Druaga has the Army of Uruk and some miscellaneous Climber parties perform a bit better than the rest of the examples of this page, but they're still not as good as the heroes. Season 2 introduces the Golden Knights, who are completely worthless against anyone with a modicum of fighting experience.

The entire UEAF navy in Martian Successor Nadesico seem to exist purely for blowing up. They rarely do anything and in one episode when the Nadesico's mechs start firing on them accidentally, easily destroy ships which allegedly cost more than the titular ship.

In Bleach the shinigami are completely useless against ANY threat which comes to them and have to be bailed out by the main heroes. Only the Lieutenants and Captains manage to be useful and avoid this, even though they are subject to The Worf Effect at the same time.

Lampshaded and acknowledged when the captains acknowledge there's maybe ten people in Soul Society who are up to fighting with Aizen, they know it, and they make up the bulk of the Gotei 13's fighting power. Also, Ichigo is apparently twice as strong as they are, which is why they suck compared to him.

Yu-Gi-Oh!, in both the anime and real life. Think about it. All monsters in the game have the highly specific role of acting as a meat shield between you and your opponent's monsters. They can die incredibly easily if you have the right deck. On the other hand, they can be upgraded into a Badass Army with Equip Spell Cards.

Dragon Ball Z sees multiple cases of Redshirt armies ripped apart by horrifically powerful aliens and androids. By the time the Buu saga rolls around you'd think they'd have learned that when someone is spotted who flies and uses Ki Attacks its best to just sit back and wait for those other flying folks to take care of the job before sending waves upon waves of men to die.

Lampshaded in the cover of chapter 144 of Blade of the Immortal manga which features a dartboard with bullseye being taken up by a picture of the leader (100 points for hitting it) while the outermost ring is a picture of a faceless goon (10 points for hitting it). See it here.

Gantz. Any and all non-Gantz hunters will be utterly useless when it comes to fighting the aliens, as seen from the Osaka arc onwards. Many Gantz hunters and whole teams die in their fights, with the ship infiltration in the End of the World arc being an exemplary instance.

In Naruto, despite the ANBU Black Ops supposedly being the strongest ninjas, they are usually killed off pretty quickly.

Super Atragon provides a rare, naval example: The massive US-led, UN fleet gets swept from the ocean in one shot.

Hibiki from Vandread runs into a Space Navy version in episode 11. They share their backstory with him just long enough to be wiped out by the bad guys and cause him to suffer some Survivor's Guilt.

The AD Police of the Bubblegum Crisis universes, to the point where they've earned the Fan Nickname "About-to-Die Police." Slightly lampshaded in the non-canon Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal comic where an AD Police grunt stands in front of a wall memorial of fallen officers and retorts against a comment on how overarmed and overpowered the AD Police are.

Most of the characters from Attack on Titan are in one. Military training is essentially designed to weed out the weaker, less skilled, and less determined of the bunch by being physically and psychologically grueling, but even the hardy recruits who manage to graduate can easily die in battle against the Titans. The manga has Loads and Loads of Characters mostly because it's quick to kill them off and introduce others.

Fairy Tail: Whenever the military of Fiore tries to dispose of villains, they're often utterly curb stomped, or forced to retreat.

Uzumaki: When The Cavalry arrive in the form of a large fleet of rescue ships, it seems like the heroes of the story might be saved. Unfortunately, the would-be rescuers last all of a single page before being swept to the depths of the sea by a Mega Maelstrom. There's no hint that they're particularly incompetent, but in the face of a nightmarish Eldritch Abomination, there's never any real chance that they'll survive.

Strike the Blood: The Island Guard. They haven't managed to kill or subdue a single monster on their own, but are almost always victims of a Curb-Stomp Battle. It's quite questionable why people want to become an Island Guard with the high casualty rates. Is the pay really that good?

Comic Books

Quite often, police officers and security guards are easily thwarted by even the lowest D-list super villain, who usually treats them more as irritating pests than serious threats, although he naturally has a harder time against the hero. Similarly, the Army proves useless when the Earth is invaded by aliens or monsters from another dimension. The exception is when the trope du jour is The Real Heroes.

The Atomic Knights are a step up from the usual. While they do have top-notch training, good teamwork and state of the art equipment, they're still essentially Red Shirts.

Same thing with the Green Lantern Corps, with an added element of Conservation of Ninjutsu. An individual Green Lantern (Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, Kilowog, Arisia etc.) is a powerful hero, but masses of nameless background Green Lanterns die in droves.

In Avengers: The Initiative, the covert-ops Shadow Initiative is re-imagined as a redshirt army in the aftermath of Secret Invasion due to the Thunderbolts now serving that function. Consisting of choice members of the original team, third-rate villains, and Initiative washouts, the Shadow Initiative is sent into hot engagements to soften up the enemy for the big guns. Of the 14 members who went on their first mission, 8 came back alive.

S.H.I.E.L.D. is a very good example. Until they got reformatted as HAMMER, which threw a pint and a half of mook into the mix, along with a dash of Villain with Good Publicity. They are supposed to be the best agents, operatives, commandos and so on in the world. However, agents would be massacred both individually and en masse by both super villains and normal Mooks. In the Ultimate Marvel universe you just wonder how they recruit. Some 30,000 agents and commandos are killed during the first strike of an Alien Invasion, and later get outmatched by superhumans on multiple occasions, usually while pulling guard duty on super-villains. And one time, their HQ was blown up, they were crippled, and then they got hammered by an army of super powered terrorists led by the Liberators.

The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers is a deconstruction of this. It shows you what it would be like to be a part of a Red Shirt Army. A large part of the story involves the characters either trying to avoid their presumably inevitable demises or flat out pretending they aren't at risk of dying. The Followup The Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye: Has a two issue arc where 6 of the lowest ranking Decepticons scour a battlefield, lamenting on the death and destruction everywhere. One even mentions how the battle took place, Megatron and Optimus both locked themselves in pods feeding them information from all combatants on their side, he mentions how an entire army was reduced to a set of statistics.

Fan Works

In RWBY Grimm Darkness, countless Atlesian soldiers become this at the end of Chapter 7, when Weiss's father is revealed to be the main villain and has every soldier aboard his ship mercilessly slaughtered by the Dark Trinity and Neo. Then he has a whole military base of them killed off by combat mechs he commissioned for the military, and then has his ship open fire on the two escorting it, killing all soldiers aboard them!

Films — Animated

Sadly, this fate befalls the supposed "elite" army in Mulan, led by Shang's father. It's to demonstrate how vicious the Huns are.

Invoked and hilariously subverted in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut; a US General Ripper intends to use all of the black men as a massive Human Shield to save them from the Canadians' gunfire. Chef, the leader of the group, is very against this plan and, when the time comes, orders his men to duck.

Averted in Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo. The Japanese Self Defense Force is actually so competent, it shocks the heroes. There's a reason for this….

Taken to absurd levels in The Adventures of Tintin; Sir Francis's crew has British soldiers wearing red. When the pirates board the ship, they are effortlessly wiped out by the pirates leaving Sir Francis to fend off the pirates on his own. Despite Sir Francis's efforts, the battle is lost and the surviving crew members are forced to leap off the ship later anyways.

A good example is the National Guard from Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem who don't even last five minutes before being wiped out, although that left the heroes with weapons and equipment, most notable a Stryker APC.

Although the army in D-War: Dragon Wars did a good job of killing Buraki's forces, the problem was there were too many of them to deal with.

In fact, individually deadly warriors often become hopelessly inept in large numbers. Consider the phenomenon of ninjas in groups, and the army of mutants in X-Men: The Last Stand; in the latter, less than a dozen demonstrated any special ability except rushing forward blindly, to the point that the previously completely ineffective human army kicks their butts. It was mentioned that those mutants were the ones with lame powers. Plus, the army had power-neutralizing weapons. A flesh wound in the shoulder turns Joe Random Rock Thrower into Joe Blow. And for the most part the mutants were all untrained civilians. The most they could do was rush forward blindly and get cut down.

Tony Stark's escort/bodyguards in Iron Man. This actually does serve as a plot point, as it is this massacre that convinces Tony Stark to stop making weapons.

The soldiers accompanying the scientists in The Blob (1988) are useless. Though their poorer performance compared to the main characters when fighting the Blob might be attributed to the heavy NBC gear they are wearing.

Very plausible example from The Rock. Commander Anderson's SEAL team enters Alcatraz through the shower room, and as they are about to move up, they encounter what appears to be a laser tripwire. In reality, said tripwire is a custom-designed motion detector built to look like a tripwire; disarming it like it is a tripwire results in it signaling an intrusion. As the SEAL team disarms it, Hummel's Marines realize what's happening and surround the SEALs as they enter the showers from an elevated position, boxing them in from good cover. In the subsequent shoot-out, the SEAL team is slaughtered to the last man. note Interestingly, there was actually a real case in Operation Just Cause that similarly(though less drastically) went badly for the SEALs when they ended up in a firefight after their cover approach failed. It was found that they had focused on insertion rather than infantry tactics (unlike the Marines), though this was largely fixed by the time the movie took place.

In many crime-related action movies or shows (the Lethal Weapon movies, for example), any uniformed police officers and / or detectives who are not the protagonists are usually little more than easily-disposable cannon fodder. Sometimes it is because they face an opponent against whom they genuinely have no chance against (such as a Terminator); other times, particularly when opposed to a small criminal syndicate, it is because they display incompetence which is nothing short of alarming for members of a modern metropolitan police department.

An exception to the above is Hot Fuzz, in which the uniformed officer is the badass action heroes and the detectives are the incompetent boobs. Doubly averted when, in the big climactic fight, the detectives prove that they're just as competent as the next man if you load them up and give them riot gear.

Played straight and averted in the John Woo movie Hard Boiled. In the tea house shootout, anyone other than Tequila and his partner is just another red shirt. The undercover cops and the SWAT team in the big hospital shootout later on, however, do hold their own quite satisfactorily despite losing a good portion of their number and get the hostages out while Tequila and Alan kick serious ass.

This happened to the army that the dwarves raised to fight Evil Incarnate in Time Bandits.

The British Army in The Last of the Mohicans fits this trope perfectly, since they not only wear actual red coats, but are unable to hit a single target in the enemy's Bad Ass Army. For that matter, they also can't land any blows during hand-to-hand combat, thereby forcing them to rely on the main protagonist's Improbable Aiming Skills to see them through.

The police SWAT teams in both Die Hard and Die Hard 2. The second one is really blatant - an entire five man SWAT team escorting Barnes to a satellite array is ambushed and killed by a team of Colonel Stuart's men who are disguised as painters. They only manage to kill one of the henchmen (Shockley) before all five are offed (one by O'Reilly, two each by Sheldon and Mulkey). That SWAT team can't take out four men armed with automatics, but McClane can with little more than a pistol.

The President's Secret Service detail in Air Force One is completely wiped out without so much as wounding a single terrorist. Then again, the terrorists did have a traitor on their side, massive surprise, and managed to secure the plane's arsenal of assault weapons and body armor before the Secret Service even realized they were under attack. No unarmored security detail outfitted with only sidearms can realistically stand up against heavily-armed and armored commandos in close-quarters. That said, the Secret Service actually did achieve their primary goal: they managed to hold off the badguys long enough to get the President to his escape capsule.

The Gotham Police Department in The Dark Knight fits under this, if only due to their body count, even though they actually prove to be quite competent — especially at the end of the movie, when the SWAT teams storm the building. The only problem is that "competent" just doesn't cut it with someone as Crazy-Prepared as the Joker and badass as Batman. Almost subverted with the faceless police van driver, except it turns out to be Gordon. Their competence becomes clear once Batman made it clear who they are supposed to target. We are given shots of SWATs knocking out and suppressing Joker's henchmen with ease.

Averted hardcore in the Transformers Film Series. When the special forces unit calls in the cavalry, the cavalry actually manages to kill or drive off the giant alien robots. They're even more effective in the sequel, managing to support a handful of Autobots in holding off a small army of Decepticons. There are cases when it's played straight. The first scene after the introduction has a US military base completely wiped out by a single Decepticon. The beginning of the sequel also shows many human NEST soldiers being killed off-hand. It's really the extensive training in killing Cybertronians that the soldiers receive from Autobots that allows them to hold their own (despite massive casualties) in the second and third films.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy uses this a lot. There's Haldir's Elves at Helm's Deep; Faramir's company in both the defeats at Osgiliath; most of Minas Tirith's guard; and most of the Rohirrim when going up against the Mûmakil.

King Kong (2005) also has this with the crew of the SS Venture seemingly existing only to die by the hands of the many dangers of Skull Island. Although later in the film it is mentioned by Carl Denham that only 17 of the party apparently died, it seems to be a lot more.

The Colonial Marines boast extensively of their badass prowess at the start of Aliens, but it only takes a few minutes for most of them to die. Except for the heroes.

The Mobile Infantry of Starship Troopers seemingly exist only to get killed in huge numbers. It's only due to gross mismanagement. It is worth noting that the trope is more than likely intentional as it is meant to show just how callous the fascist government is towards its troops, and may also be a deconstruction of Hollywood Tactics by showing what actually happens when you try to use them.

In G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the US Army and generic Joe troopers are like this, easily getting slaughtered by MARS's elite soldiers and vastly superior technology.

Face/Off has FBI agents, cops, special forces and security staff who are reduced to the role of red shirts when they must face Castor Troy in a gunfight. It's as if only Sean Archer has ever taken on Castor and lived to tell the tale.

Last time I had a hot meal was five days ago. Since then my entire platoon has been wiped out. That's why you're here. You're just a bunch of guys in line to get shot so they can bring in a bunch of other guys. See how that works?

The above is somewhat undercut by Hartman's own words earlier in the film: "...you will become dead marines. And then you will be in a world of shit. Because marines are not allowed to die without permission!"

The S.T.A.R.S. operatives in Resident Evil: Apocalypse fit the bill. Their rooftop sniper, who had previously been headshotting zombies left right and center, instead chooses to shoot Nemesis in the chest repeatedly and is promptly blown up. The rest of them don't learn his lesson, and fire ineffectively at Nemesis for a short while before they're all mowed down too.

The opening scene of A New Hope is a Rebel squad getting wiped out by inexplicably competent Imperial stormtroopers. Later, in the Battle of Yavin, the Y-wing squadron is completely wiped out and only a handful of pilots from the X-wing squadron survive.

Similarly, in The Empire Strikes Back, the Rebel troops are routed at the Battle of Hoth with Luke's heroics providing much of the offense.

And it happens yet again in The Force Awakens, when many of the Resistance fighters are easily wiped out while attacking Starkiller Base.

In Attack of the Clones the Jedi rescue team that Mace Windu brings to Geonosis to save Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme counts. They make a dramatic entrance at the Geonosian Arena, and are promptly surrounded by an army of battle droids with nearly all of the Jedi being killed within a few minutes.

Towards the end of Revenge of the Sith, nearly the entire Jedi order are wiped out within the space of 60 seconds or so, with the exception of Yoda who survives but gets his ass handed to him by Darth Sidious and Obi-Wan who dove into the water. Jedi throughout the series had been presented as tough, badass dudes that are hard to kill and deceive, but it took clone troopers to wipe them out no less. The difference with the clone troops is that they took the Jedi by surprise. The clones had been their loyal and trusted men, and suddenly they all pointed their guns at them and started shooting - they never saw it coming.

An odd variation occurs in Inception. The resident Badass Crew has to deal with constant attacks by heavily armed soldiers/bodyguards while moving through the dreamworlds, but this is because they're "projections" created by the dreamer's subconscious, whose primary purpose is to protect that dreamer. In effect, they're a sort of mental security force. Fortunately, being projections, they aren't actual people, though depending on how well-trained the dreamer is at resisting mental intrusion the projections can be anything from an angry mob of unarmed civilians to highly-trained and heavily-armed soldiers.

Occurs in Doomsday, when a group of highly-trained, heavily-armed British special forces in armored personnel carriers get killed in a matter of minutes by some punks with ice picks and a crossbow.

The 2009 Star Trek, of course. The Narada wipes out Earth's entire defense fleet in seconds and most of the Starfleet Academy graduating class with it. The only reason the Enterprise survived was that it got there late thanks to Sulu leaving the parking brake on, and Nero chooses to let them watch as he destroys Vulcan.

The Spartans in 300 are a Red Cape Army, a very capable one, but one nonetheless

In Jack the Giant Slayer the majority of the guardians who climb up the beanstalk to rescue Isabelle don't even make it up the beanstalk before facing their demise. All the others are killed by the giants quickly. Doesn't help that most of the Guardians are wearing red shirts.

The Cleaners in Underworld: Evolution are a group of well-trained Badass Normals from special forces all over the world. They get quickly slaughtered by Marcus Corvinus. By the end of the film, the remaining few are mauled by his brother William and turned into first-gen Lycans. Then again, their primary job wasn't to fight vampires or Lycans but to hide any evidence of their existence from Muggles. Additionally, when going after William, they reveal that all they packed is UV ammunition, which is mostly harmless to Lycans.

Oblivion (2013) : Aside from Sergeant Sykes and a female subordinate, the Scavenger soldiers are wiped out to a man during the second drone attack on their base, to the point of only Sykes and his subordinate are left to fight off the much bigger third wave. Good things the drones are a Keystone Army...

Olympus Has Fallen: All of the secret service agents and Capitol Police guarding the White House get slaughtered by the bad guys, and the rescue attempt by the military fails spectacularly with the deaths of most of soldiers, forcing Gerard Butler to save the day himself.

The same can be said for the secret service, capitol police, national guard, and especially Delta Force, in White House Down. White House Down offers a particularly glaring example, as the entire White House is taken over be a mere handful of terrorists who suffer no casualties in the process

In The Chronicles of Riddick the Necromongers defeat the Helion forces in a single night, which only takes a few minutes onscreen.

In The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, Leo orders one of his employees to fill out 50 character sheets for the same character. He then sends them one by one into battle just to get instantly killed. Eventually, Luster uses the "pile of dead bards" as a hiding place.

The US military in Godzilla (2014). Not that they're incompetent though, just that they're facing off against something that can emit electromagnetic pulses which disables electronics, something that the military relies on heavily. And small arms fire, or even tank shells against heavily armoured creatures that even nukes can't really harm doesn't do much to slow them down. Fortunately they realize that Godzilla is more interested in hunting the MUTO's than attacking humans. The army is well aware of their red shirt status, but they're willing to bite the bullet to save as many lives as they can.

This trope is actually something of an Invoked Trope /Discussed Trope, as when the Mutos and Godzilla are heading towards San Francisco Admiral Stenz says something along the lines of "I am throwing away hundreds of lives every minute just trying to steer one of those things away from populated areas, and there are two more of them." The army is well aware of their red shirt status, but they're willing to bite the bullet to save as many lives as they can.

You see, it's very important to note that the army is well aware of their red shirt status, but also that they're willing to bite the bullet to save asmany livesas they can.

Inverted in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. After retrieving a weapons cache in the face of a small army of police, with much automatic gunfire and several police cars blown up, the T-850's visual display shows a tally of rounds expended and "human casualties: 000". This has been given as an example of A-Team Firing, but it was deliberate on the Terminator's part.

In Jason and the Argonauts, Jason recruits only the best athletes and warriors in all Greece to accompany him in his quest, but they never actually do much except distract Talos while Jason goes around to get his ankle. Oh, and those two guys who admittedly put up an admirable effort (but still both die) against the skeletons at the end. Oh, and that one guy who jumps in the sea after the traitor Acastus and subsequently gets killed in an underwater fight by said traitor.

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the loyal SHIELD agents that guard the Triskelion get mowed down left and right by the HYDRA infiltrators and the Winter Soldier after Captain America reveals the truth. To be fair, in their case it wasn't that the SHIELD agents were incompetent, just massively out-manned and outgunned. In even fights, such as the battle for the main control room, the SHIELD agents manage to give as good as they get.

The ACU personnel from Jurassic World; They appear to be highly competent at what they do (reinforced when they respond to and quickly quell the Pteranodon rampage), but the Indominus Rex is far beyond what they're prepared to handle and a whole team of them are slaughtered.

The human footmen in WarCraft die in droves every time they show up on screen. To their defence, there hasn't been any war in Azeroth in centuries, while their enemies are battle-hardened veterans from a dying world, and remarkably enough, the "red shirts" manage to accomplish all of their goals through magic support and sheer determination.

Lone Wolf's mission in Book 4 at first is to discover the fate of a hundred strong unit of cavalry led by Captain D'Val. Lone Wolf sets off with a force of fifty Rangers; the medieval equivalent of Special Forces. True to the trope, regardless of whatever decisions the player makes, the entire force is either forced to return home, ends up missing, or killed in increasingly unlikely ways (e.g. bandit ambushes, falling through floorboards in a mine, eaten by a giant squid, eaten by a giant worm, eaten by giant cats, falling into a pit trap). Averted with the actual cavalry Lone Wolf was sent to find. During the book's climax battle they live up to their reputation as fine soldiers and rout their numerically superior foe. Lone Wolf's involvement in that battle isn't actually that significant (no One-Man Army scenario here).

If anyone is wondering why the pit trap death is silly, it was located in the middle of a corridor, activated when Lone Wolf unlocks the door at the end. If its purpose was to keep an intruder from opening the door, it's the most poorly designed trap ever. It was very obviously designed to kill anyone accompanying an intruder opening the door.

Literature

In Eric Flint's Belisarius series Rana Sanga comments on the battle described in the Bhagavad Gita, how it is the most famous battle in all of Indian history and how no one remembers even one of the names of the mere mortals who did all the dying.

The battle in the next-to-the-last Animorphs book involves one that survives. The US army launches a military force consisting, essentially, of hundreds of soldiers accompanied by a couple dozen Sixth Rangers. And this military force's goal is a suicide mission worthy of the best of them: to launch an attack, in plain view, against a spaceship that "could blow asteroids out of the sky." Ordinarily a Sixth Ranger ranks much higher on the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality. But in this case, Visser One orders the Sixth Rangers killed first, because he takes them more seriously in both a strategic and a personal sense. And the Animorphs manage to sabotage his ship too late to save the Sixth Rangers, but in time for the ordinary soldiers to survive. When they are the survivors, and some kids with superpowers are the casualties, it's a clear example of a plot that thwarts the usual laws of the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality. There is also the Auxiliary Animorphs. Toby's Hork-Bajir army get killed a lot, too, near the end of the series.

The Martian army in Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan are deliberately constructed to be utterly wiped out on the moment of contact, in order that the course of human society can be changed by making them feel guilty for slaughtering the poor bastards.

Subverted and used in Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Subverted because the military arms its soldiers with the most advanced weaponry around, gives them telepathic links to each other and their guns and trains them to be incredibly effective soldiers. Used because the universe is just that damn dangerous and 75% of them don't last more than 5 years anyway.

Each of the Ciaphas Cain HERO OF THE IMPERIUM novels will inevitably feature a part where Cain is forced to enter the jaws of hell, usually accompanied only by his sidekick and army (possibly with a few Mauve Shirts thrown in). The trope is however subverted as often as it's played straight, to the end that you can usually never tell if the book's army will survive or not: Several Mauve Shirts in the series actually came from Cain's (more successful) escort missions.

Played with in Gaunt's Ghosts. Occasionally the Tanith First-and-Only is a Redshirt Army, and occasionally they're hyper-competent badasses. It all seems to depend on how prepared they are, and how many of them there are. Some books also contrast their performance, usually favourably, with other units', such as the local armies on Aexe Cardinal in Straight Silver and AT 137 in The Armour of Contempt. The Tanith First-and-Only specialize as scouts and skirmish troops and are excellent in missions of that nature. When used as frontline troops where stealth and mobility is not that useful, they take casualties similar to other units.

The Prophecy of the Stones. Whenever the good guys fight in a battle, expect the vast majority of unnamed characters to die. At the beginning of the final battle, the Army of Light and the Army of Darkness (guess which sides they belong to) are evenly matched in the thousands, but by the end of the battle the Army of Light is reduced to hundreds and hasn't even made a dent in the Army of Darkness. Either the Army of Darkness is scarily competent, or the good guys suck.

The Cleavers in Skulduggery Pleasant count as this trope, as every major battle they are in ends with all of them dead. Partly lampshaded as it is said that their numbers have been devastated.

The deghans in the Farsala Trilogy are the ruling and fighting class of Farsala, but when the Hrum launch an invasion they're all dead within two chapters.

In World War II, it was noted that replacements (including officers) died at a much higher rate than experienced troops.

Averted in the Destroyermen series. USS Walker's Lemurian allies do take heavy losses over the course of the series, but they inflict casualties several orders of magnitude worse on the Grik.

In the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, there are a series of flash-trained clones grown in special cylinders meant to help supplement the woefully undermanned Grand Army of the Republic. Sadly, these quick-cloned troopers aren't nearly as effective as the properly trained ones. Furthermore, as the Clone Troopers transitioned into Storm Troopers, there were at least some lackluster examples due to a variety of reasons, from the transitioning from Jango clones to less impressive specimens, recruitment from non-clones, and the fact that the Kaminoans rebelled, so the Empire lost some of its best trainers at the time.

Clodge ball teams in Idlewild fit: virtual armies of cyborgs, nightgaunts, hobgoblins, and gangsters that are expected to die in large numbers every fight.

Played Straight in The War of the Worlds (1897). The British Army is wiped out by the Martian tripods wielding heat beams and poison gas. Only artillery is effective against the machines, but the guns rarely got a first shot, let alone a second. The Martians themselves are red-shirted, courtesy of Terran microbes.

CTU field teams will succeed in their mission only if either Jack Bauer, Curtis Manning, or both are present. If they appear to be completing their mission without a main character, that probably means they're about to be vaporized by a nuclear bomb. This rule also applies to any other armed detail mentioned, including the LAPD, Secret Service, and the freaking Delta Force, all of whom have completely bought the farm at one point or another (for some, repeatedly) while "setting up a perimeter," (a common 24 portent of doom), guarding something or somebody important, or intercepting a fugitive, respectively.

The Season Seven finale actually subverts audience expectations with the airport security guards when they attempt to rescue Kim Bauer. While most of them are killed, they actually do manage to kill both of her captors, a pair of extremely well-trained agents.

Heck, one of them actually manages to shoot Kim's male captor through a car windshield one-handed after already getting shot by said captor.

Special mention goes to the often mocked CTU security guards who, on Days 4 and 5, actually wore red shirts.

In the Wham Episode, "Severed Dreams", this trope is tweaked with Security Chief Garibaldi arranging sensible defensive tactical positioning for his troops for expected invaders. However, the Narn troopers under his command insist on charging headlong into the fray and the regular guards have no choice but to follow them.

The episode "GROPOS" has Franklin's father use the station as a staging area before deploying his men to take a heavily guarded fortress. They take the fortress, but most of the men (Including every named character among them apart from General Franklin) die.

The Initiative soldiers in Season Four, who took a little under an hour to catch up to the Slayer, and took her 17 seconds to disable the lot of them. This was in training; they lasted less time in actual combat.

Appears throughout Season 7 with the Potentials. When the army of Potentials storms both the winery and the Hellmouth in the series finale, they take massive losses. Justified Trope by their lack of Buffy-level superpowers and training. Season 8 has newly activated slayers taking up this role.

UNIT has a tendency to fall into this category, although in some of their more recent appearances they've shown the ability to learn from their past mistakes.

One example is in the episode "The Poison Sky". The Sontaran army uses a field that makes the copper jacketed bullets expand inside guns to jam them. A fair number of UNIT troops are thus slaughtered when their guns fail. UNIT, upon being told this, gets steel jacketed bullets and teaches those arrogant bastards that the human race is not to be messed with. The Sontarans' claims of "sport" aside, clearly they aren't that used to their prey fighting back.

As of 2005, if your security is wearing black uniforms and have guns, you've probably hired one.

In season 5 the Unsullied, stated repeatedly of being the best army in the world, are turning into this.

Stannis Baratheon's army becomes this when they face the much larger and less weary Bolton cavalry.

Heroes: If Sylar is under attack from Company Agents (excluding HRG and The Haitian), those agents are probably going to die.

Jericho: The fictional company Ravenwood (a loose allusion to Blackwater), who is supposed to be full of ex SEALs and other Special Ops guys, gets their ass handed to them by guys with no military experience, including a deaf mute girl with a shotgun.

Every major battle involves one group of redshirts attacking another group of redshirts with the main characters from both sides escaping unscathed:

The mercenary attack on the Barracks in the fourth season, where three redshirts (and presumably a fourth who was unaccounted for) are shot by redshirt mercenaries in the jungle. They then proceed to open fire on Sawyer, but their Stormtrooper training prevents them from hitting him.

Subverted Trope if one subscribes to the theory that Claire was killed when a redshirt mercenary with a rocket launcher blew up her house.

Subverted again when Ben unleashes the smoke monster on the redshirt mercenaries, but only one dies, even after hearing several minutes of terrified screams.

At the end of the fourth season, a group of redshirt Others attack the redshirt mercenaries and kill them all...with, you guessed it, the exception of their leader.

Which is even more ironic when said leader kills one of his own redshirts accidentally by kicking a grenade over to their position.

In the fifth season, the Others use fire arrows to attack the mass of redshirt survivors in 1954. Again, the main characters escape, but most, if not all, of the redshirt survivors are finally killed, ending four seasons of slaughter.

The DHARMA Initiative seems to have its own redshirt army. In a subversion of this trope, however, a shootout involving Jack, Kate, and Daniel versus Radzinsky and two DHARMA mooks ends with no casualties, not even the redshirts.

Merlin (2008): The Knights of Camelot, apart from the named ones...and even many of them got it eventually. Or in the case of Sir Leon, a couple times.

Revolution: As the first season goes on, the Rebels and the Georgian Federation join forces to form an army of 300 men ("The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia"). In the episode "The Longest Day", one Monroe Republic drone strike reduces the number from 300 to 30. President Foster states that this is half of her army wiped out, and she assigned 200 Georgian troops to Miles Matheson.

Any Russian character appearing on the show had a 99% chance of being killed, unless they were female. Even recurring character Colonel Chekov eventually bites it after gaining command of the first Russian starship. Which is promptly destroyed.

Similarly, the first Chinese starship also gets blasted (although it's not entirely destroyed), off-screen this time. However, before anyone starts saying how anything Russian- or Chinese-made is of poor quality, both ships were US-manufactured, then given to the Russians and the Chinese.

The Air Force security forces that guard the Cheyenne Mountain complex are a perfect example. They're routinely killed off by various offworld enemies to demonstrate how threatening they are.

Star Trek: Despite it being the Trope Namer, quite a few of the characters that die in Star Trek: The Original Series are blue shirts or gold shirts. The first broadcast episode of the original series ("The Man Trap") has a body count of four minor crewmen, most of whom of course become monster chow shortly after beaming down to the planet. Ironically, the casualties are two blues, a gold and one unknown wearing a hazmat suit. In fact, no red shirt deaths occur until the seventh episode. The dubious honor goes to Crewman Mathews, who is pushed into a bottomless pit in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?". In addition, this trope is completely averted in "A Taste of Armageddon": Kirk, Spock, and three redshirts beam down to Eminiar VII where, upon landing, they are sent to be killed. All of them survive.

Scotty is one of the few characters to wear a red shirt in the original series, and he's one of the few characters to survive into "Next Generation." He does get killed once, but he gets better.

As Nichelle Nichols points out in one of her ME-TV promos, she wore red all the way through the series — "guess I just wore it better!"

According to this set of statistics about Star Trek deaths, red shirt deaths actually only make up 58% of the deaths. However, since there are so many red shirts, their mortality rate is actually lower than the yellow shirts' (25 of 239 (about 10.5%) compared to 10 of 55 (about 18%)). In fact, even if you go by 43 being the number of red shirt deaths, the yellow shirts still have a slightly higher mortality rate.

Supergirl: In numerous episodes, the heroes will be accompanied into battle by various DEO agents. Chances are, they won't last long.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Notably used in the last episode of Season 1, in which Agent James Ellison takes a fully tooled-out FBI Hostage Rescue Team in to storm a terminator's motel room. The HRT is some 20 or so members strong, fully tooled for bear with bulletproof vests, assault rifles, and helmets, and is merrily dispatched in the space of about two minutes to the beautiful crooning of Johnny Cash.

Roleplay

This has invariably happened a few times in Dino Attack RPG, among the cases one minor group of disguised agents is accidentally gunned down in a friendly fire incident. Believe it or not, this was actually inverted during the final battle. After Triggerdeserted the team he was relentlessly pursued by Pharisee who led a small squad of agents, the only one given any particular development being his second-in-command Montgonel. These events culminated in a violent confrontation between Trigger and Pharisee that resulted in the other being knocked out. When facing the others, Montgonel was critically wounded (he survived, but was out of commission for the rest of the RPG) and Trigger was fatally wounded, while at least three of the aforementioned redshirts that accompanied Pharisee emerged unscathed.

Tabletop Games

In Paranoia, player characters take on the role of Trouble Shooters, whose job it is to track down trouble in Alpha Complex and shoot it. Given that the PCs are supposed to get in over their heads and diehorribly, this means the player characters are the example. They even start as Red-class citizens, which comes with uniforms in the appropriate color...

Planetary Defense Forces in Warhammer 40,000 are almost uniformly treated as speed bumps by any invader, or for Chaos, a ready supply of expendable minions, generally getting wiped out in the first ten minutes or so of any invasion. The Imperial Guard also fulfills this function when the Space Marines are the protagonists.

It's been joked that the PDF is the Redshirt Army for the Redshirt Army. Hardly surprising, considering manpower is the only resource the Imperium has in excess.

Averted in that some PDFs are as good as their Imperial Guard counterparts. Also justified, as the PDFs best soldiers and units are usually taken to fill up the ranks of the Imperial Guard. It's basically light infantry vs. the legions of hell. Also the only reason that they are considered one is because everything else is genetically modified, sports ridiculous technology, comes in numbers much larger than theirs or backed by a god of some sort. So the fact that they go up against them anyway makes them a Badass Army if anything.

The Imperial Guard have been known to subvert this, though, for one very good reason. Sure, the soldiers usually fit the Red Shirt line. But they also have tanks. Lots and lots of tanks.

And more so, lots of lots upon lots of lots of lots of men. They will drown their enemies in their blood, and bury them under their corpses. The only resource the Imperium of Man is never short is manpower. Your soldiers being worth 20 of theirs isn't much good if they can field 50 times the amount of your soldiers.

No-where is this made more evident than in the Siege Of Vraks books. The lords and masters need to re-take a world but its an absolute fortress and it would take a vast (even by Imperial standards) deployment of forces to just go take it back today. The alternative ? A 12 year siege that will only kill 9 million guardsmen. And then that doesn't even go to plan anyway.

The average Guardsman is tithed from the top 10% of his world's PDF. He is equipped with armour that'll hold well against most modern small-arms, and armed with a beam rifle that hits like a 7.62mm round sans the recoil and casing drop, and can be recharged by virtually any power source. They are often trained on Deathworlds - planets that, while technically habitable, are so inimical to human life that Siberian winters looks downright hospitable in comparison. If lucky, they face things that want to kill them or possibly eat them. If unlucky, they face the prospect of being enslaved or being tortured to death over decades or even centuries. At worst, the long, drawn-out death is only an overture to an eternity in a Hell that makes Dante's Inferno seem like a Hotel & Spa vacation.

And still they hold the line, not because they're particularly brave (by the standards of the setting) but because it's the only option they have. If they fail they die, if they flee they die because now not only does the enemy still wants them dead but so do their former comrades, if they do hold the line then there's a microscopic chance they live to see another day and almost certainly another chance to die horribly, Crapsack World indeed.

Want a good way to be scared of this universe? Consider that the standard-issue lasgun has more firepower than most conventional bullet-firing modern firearms, and standard-issue flak armour can stop a lasgun shot while bulletproof vests today can only reliably stop shotgun shells and pistol bullets. Imperial Guardsmen, of course, die in droves. If real life Earth was invaded by an Eldar warhost, an Ork WAAAGH! or a Tyranid Hive Fleet, we certainly wouldn't last very long at all.

Ork armies also count. They are more numerous than every other race in the galaxy (except the Tyranids, if we include the large force of Tyranids who haven't entered the galaxy yet). They die in droves, but many more are ready to take their place.

Speaking of Tyranids, the average gaunt warrior is born with no digestive system; they're expected to die in combat looooong before starving to death is even a remote possibility, though they're closer to the role of Mooks.

BattleTech the Clans treats its Solahma units as this, they are composed of older warriors who are assigned in menial tasks or send out as shock troopers so they can die fighting.

"Weenie" decks in Magic: The Gathering follow this principle. A Weenie is a cheap (usually one-drop), efficient Creature. A Weenie deck will use a horde of these Creatures to swamp the enemy, usually sustaining heavy casualties in the process. This is also true in the case of tokens; cheap, disposable creatures usually generated en masse from other cards. A particularly successful weenie or token attack with few casualties averts this trope, and becomes a Zerg Rush instead.

Video Games

The all-time kings of this trope have to be Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games and their creeps/minions/reinforcements/whathaveyou. Left to their own devices, the Mooks of each side are perfectly matched and will fight themselves to a total stalemate. Their only purpose is to be killed by the tens by opposing Heroes for gold and experience.

This is common in First Person Shooters. Redshirt Armies can be used as part of the Back Story, explaining why It's Up to You. Other times, the Redshirt Army is made up of NPCs who are pathetically weak, die easily, and can barely shoot, especially when compared with the main character. It's usually difficult to keep these allies alive, and the player is rarely offered any incentive or reward for doing so, beyond, perhaps, personal satisfaction — or a hefty penalty if they die.

Mass Effect 2: We get to see the quarian flotilla's marines on four separate occasions. In the first occasion, we see them get unceremoniously slaughtered by a heavy mech after disobeying their commander and rushing at it. In the second, we see them get overrun by a huge geth force and slaughtered (except Kal'Reegar, who's more like a Mauve Shirt). In the third occasion, a group of what's explicitly stated to be their "best marines", get massacred by minor enemies off-screen... This is actually a plot point, because the flotilla's politicians want to go to war with the geth. Kal'Reegar says that the only way for them to win, would be to fight from orbit, taking full advantage of quarian tech expertise, because a front-line conflict would be such a slaughter. On the fourth occasion (in an optional side mission), a squad crash lands on an uncharted planet, and all but one of them (who Shepared rescues) get slaughtered by varren (wolves IN SPACE).

In the opening scene aboard the SSV Normandy, we see a new NPC called "Ensign". She dies.

In Mass Effect 3, every army in the galaxy effectively becomes one of these…which is only to be expected, since they're fighting endless swarms of Reapers. To put this in perspective, the Big Bad of the first game was a single individual Reaper.

In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the Marines on the tanker get effortlessly slaughtered by Russian mercenaries. Then they just stand around doing nothing while Ocelot murders their commanding officer and sets off explosives to sink the ship. Later on, the Navy SEALs are doing pretty well until a super-speed vampire and a woman packing an energy shield and a BFG came along). To be even more fair, it did turn out that the Patriots sent them in so they would fail.

In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Snake is held up by an apparent Mook and obediently drops his gun, then turns to face his attacker. He promptly notices that the safety on the mook's gun is still on and points this out, calling him a rookie. The rookie instantly corrects Snake, stating that he's a ten-year vet. A noticeably confused Snake immediately disarms the rookie and throws him to the ground, wondering how he managed to make it ten years. Oddly enough, despite his bumbling nature, the guy is not a Red Shirt, confusing Snake even more (he is actually recurring Joke Character Johnny Sasaki). Even more baffling, this goofball gets Snake's girl, Merryl whom many expected he'd be shipped with. He turns out to be something of a badass during the game's conclusion. Also in 4, gameplay occurs between a PMC and local army. Both sides are guilty of spawning and then running in front of snipers, gun emplacements, and die quickly.

In Metal Gear: Ghost Babel for the Game Boy Color, Snake is meant to assisted by a platoon of Delta Force commandos. They (You've guessed it) are wiped out before you've got through the first stage.

In the first mission of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, the two unnamed suit-clad Maverick cyborgs do quite well against Desperado mooks but get their arses handed to them quite easily by Sundowner. Jetstream Sam mops the floor with the rest. At least the Maverick guys get to die to bosses, though; the soldiers of the African country take this Up to Eleven, being slaughtered en masse by the mooks you go through by the dozen.

The Resistance members in the Mega Man Zero games were woefully under-trained and outgunned in every engagement they were in. One wonders how the Resistance was able to hang for so long before Zero came in to save their hides from giant mechs and enemy generals. To their credit from about half-way through the second game the Resistance manages to AVOID this trope, since Zero pledges to keep any more redshirts from getting killed, and he keeps that promise! In the third game, the rebuilt Copy X states that he was holding back because resistance leader Ciel is human, and he is (mostly) bound by the first law of robotics. That said, there's probably no excusing the fact that it wasn't just the Resistance fielding an army of red shirts, but also the Neo Arcadian forces. The typical foot soldier of the army, the Pantheon model, has very little purpose in life other than to explode into tiny pieces.

Mega Man ZX has another group of these, the Guardians. They do much better than the resistance, but when Serpent sends his forces to take out the Guardian airship, it's up to Vent/Aile to bail them out...Then again, all they did was destroy an air-ship and fight off the Psycho for Hire. The Guardians did most of the work defending their own ship, it seems.

The Hunters in the sequel get special note for averting the trope. In fact, they get a Crowning Moment of Awesome at the beginning of the game for surviving against the resident Psycho for Hire, and stole the Biometal out from under his nose.

In the original Doom, the protagonist's entire military unit is wiped out before the game starts (the protagonist then blasts his way through a demon-filled complex that bested an entire unit of elite soldiers).

You find their corpses all the way through hell though, so it's obvious some of them managed to progress (and they probably reduced the number of enemies you face...). I'd say they were quite badass, just not badass enough.

Given DOOM has a love of invisible teleports, sudden ambushes and all other life-ending trickery liberally scattered around every map, it's more likely that these marines were minding their own business and then suddenly found themselves being whisked away and killed off horribly in the space of a few seconds.

The final stages of Half-Life are filled with corpses of Black Mesa Expeditionists. If only they knew you were capable of single-handedly wiping out all Mooks and defeating the Big Bad, they could've saved all those lives.

System Shock 1 & 2 also show one as deceased bodies waiting for you to take their loot and diaries to finish the job they couldn't.

To be honest, player character in System Shock 2 had the advantage of some illegal neural implants and guidance of insane AI considering him her avatar, though the latter eventually meant additional Big Bad to deal with.

Protagonists from both games also have the advantage of the experience of everyone that died before. For example, most people who died in the early hours didn't know about the cyborg conversion chambers, the CPU core controls on the elevators, and so on.

Halo is one series to have a "plausible" explanation for this; the protagonists are usually unique Super Soldiers inherently superior to normal soldiers. Halo also does the "senseless loss of life" nod to the other characters, with NPCs like Cortana often expressing disappointment and regret if an entire unit of Marines is wiped out. That said, allied AI is stupid even by "normal soldier" standards. Their Artificial Stupidity makes them Too Dumb to Live.

For the most part, allied AI improved somewhat each game. By Halo: Reach, they even started to comprehend blast radii... In general, the Marines and other human troops can be useful allies to have, but they die faster than an ice cream cone in a volcano if the player isn't careful. Unfortunately for you, the enemy's AI got correspondingly smarter as your allies' did.

Red Faction's AI wasn't the best, but your allies were especially terrible. Fellow miners would often die 20 seconds after you meet them, and couldn't at all keep up with the regular mookthree-on-one even with the same weapon.

In the Red Faction series, the Red Faction soldiers may as well be called the Red Shirt Faction.

The AI in "Red Faction: Guerrilla" isn't much better. Guerrillas last longer than they did in the first game, eventually get weapons on par with the EDF, and are smart enough to use cover, but are not nearly as efficient as the enemy, who will swarm you with loads of soldiers and gun your ass down before you can even blink.

In the Resistance series, the soldiers are often treated as red shirt, killed in scripted events for the introduction of new Chimera enemies, killed in other scripted events, though it is possible to save a few from a few scripted events where you could still move.

In F.E.A.R., the protagonist is supplemented (twice) with Delta Force squads, who are very quickly killed (twice). The first group of three are slain by Alma near the very start of the game, and the second group of two are instantly shot to death by Replica soldiers as the helicopter carrying them to the Armacham building lands.

Marathon had the Born on Boards, (Bob, for short) that were the very definition of this trope, existing only to die horribly (by the player or by the Pfhor, it really doesn't matter) while shouting "They're everywhere!" The second game actually gives them pistols; however, they are still more or less useless save for a single prison break operation that amounts to their Crowning Moment of Awesome. Lord knows they deserved it!

While statistically fought against more then with in the main games, fairies in the Touhou series generally fill this role in the fan spin-offs revolving around strategy as relatively weak allies and foes to be shot down by more powerful (and intelligent) characters. Luckily, non-lethal spellcard rules means that fairies rarely actually die in spite of their criminal incompetence, and even when that isn't the case, fairies rarely ever stay dead with the ability to regenerate almost instantly.

Real Time games, in which the player temporarily controls a unit and micro-manages them, can have this problem as well. Once the player stops controlling a unit, its AI takes over and IQ plummets dramatically. In War Craft II, the wizard units have deadly artillery style spells, but, under the AI, attack in hand-to-hand combat.

Though Call of Duty squadmates can be capable in their own right, they merely exist to hold off the mooks until you can blaze a trail through them. An interesting aversion are the plot-critical redshirts, who absolutely refuse to take any damage until just after their usefulness runs out.

Subverted in Quake IV. Sure, a lot of Marines do die over the course of the game, but hey, it's war. At least they're able to hold their own very well in individual firefights, and they actually do manage to win the war while the player character merely spearheads the most essential operations. In fact, in most cases when Marines leave the player character it's because they have orders to hang back and secure a checkpoint, rather than because they were killed off by the enemy.

Fire Emblem green units, unless they're villagers or other non-fighting units, are suicidal. Come to think of it, most enemy units are suicidal too. Plus, in cut scenes, you frequently get to see the green units getting destroyed by fairly weak enemy units.

Somewhat averted in the tenth game of the series. Not only are the Green and Yellow units able to stand up against the enemies, some of them are just plain necessary to get by a battle with minimal casualties, and you can give orders to the yellow units, to say, block a path of enemies to serve as meat shield.

Final Fantasy XII averts this trope by having wandering NPCs that can help you out in fighting monsters.

Until you reach the Seeq hunters who randomly piss-off Garudas only to flee in terror until their inevitable deaths.

Also averted in MediEvil, when Sir Dan summons a group of knights to help him battle the Big Bad's minions. The knights Sir Dan summons are actually quite competent fighters, and they need to be-if they die, it's game over.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption had an encounter between three Space Pirates and three Galactic Federation Marines. Two of the Marines get gunned down, and then the third activates his PED and owns the Space Pirates on his lonesome. He's not the only PED trooper; in the next room you see one wasting a Pirate who's focused on you, and another shoots down a pipe and kills two of them in one go. The GFM troopers remain fairly competent for the remainder of the game as well.

Until the obligatory escort mission where they forget that their mission is to survive. Instead they throw themselves suicidally at enemy forces, despite knowing full well their bodyguard (you) could handle all the combat solo.

Done almost to the point of parody in Tiger Road. In the intro, some Mooks kidnap the villagers, then a single mook stays behind and slaughters the entire city guard.

Mostly averted in the last levels of Star Wars: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. In order to show how much less disciplined the Reborn are compared to real Jedi, real Jedi fight and kill them. They still require Kyle Katarn's/Jaden Korr's help to actually make any progress, though.

Not averted in X-Wing, Rogue Squadron and other similar flight titles, where allied pilots are about as useless as a sack of hair.

But rather scarily inverted in X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, where the AI pilots, at higher levels, can sometimes leave the player feeling like a fifth wheel. This make sense as the game was designed primarily for multiplayer, so if a single player didn't have smart wingmen and enemies, he would get flattened or be unable to keep up in multiplayer against more skilled human opponents and allies.

Played straight in Knights of the Old Republic during the attack on the Star Forge. The Jedi Council sends you an "elite" strike team of Jedi Knights... all of whom get (easily) killed by the various Mooks the place has to offer.

Scarily played straight with 'The Force Unleashed', where, even though your alliance switches often according to the AI, some examples include during the prologue, hang behind, and all clone troopers will be demolished by the wookies, without taking down one, even going so far as for the troopers to tell Darth Vader that they can't break the wookies front line. Another example is when Starkiller stumbles across a fight between stormtroopers and general militia (keep in mind this is before the Rebel Alliance is formed), and if you hang back, the group of around 25 militia are wiped out by a group of 10 stormtroopers, even when reinforcements arrive, with the stormtroopers losing less than 5 troops. The wookies, when Starkiller returns to Kashyyyk, fare better against the stormtroopers, but not enough to make a huge difference.

SeeD in Final Fantasy VIII. Understandable as, even though they're trained to be elite mercenaries contracted by governments, they're still teenagers with very little real combat experience. Fortunately, they're still able to protect their home base from an invasion by the current military superpower, and hold it off long enough for the protagonists to take down the enemy commanders.

Whenever a bunch of NPC allies appear in a Super Robot Wars game, they will die before the cut scene is over. The non-OG games usually use GMs or other weak Real Robots, but the Original Generation games give this duty to the Gespensts. Ironic thing is, Badass Normal and one-man-army Kai Kitamura pilots one of those Gespensts, and just will not be shot down easily.

Hilariously subverted in Z's Special Disc scenario. In one route, YOU control the Redshirts (later backed up by the Big O). They have grunt mechs and grunt pilots going against a fairly large group of Mooks. Even without the Big O, they can handle them with decent strategy.

In Dead Space, while the main character (an engineer in his forties, in average shape) is able to dispatch Necromorphs by the dozen, a military ship (~100 soldiers) is taken over by a single, non-replicating Necromorph. Fail. This can be somewhat justified by the fact that standart military weapons are less effective against necromorphs. However, even that necromorphs are more resilient to body shots than dismembering, they CAN be killed that way, it just needs a lot of firepower (about whole ammunition clip, depends on difficulty). Which fully armed warship with contingent of marines definitely HAD. So thats a very weak excuse.

Also in its sequel game Dead Space 2, when Isaac tries to enter the Government Section on the Sprawl and takes out the power grid in order to access to the Ssction, the entire villain's military force is immediately overrun and crushed by hordes of Necromorphs.

Not that that wasn't a realistic loss on their side though. In the minute or so following the power grid failure you can see hundreds of Necromorphs if you point a flashlight out the window. That's more then Isaac ever had to contend with at any one time. Also note that the military force was equiped by firearms designed to kill humans, which are much less useful on necromorphs than repurposed mining equipment due to fact that necromorphs are vulnerable to dismembering, not the body and organ puncturing. Isaac can utilize even those weapons against necromorphs effectively, however it needs quite skill and expertise in killing necromorphs that the soldiers probably didnt have. Standart body shots are going to kill necromorph eventually, but it takes much more time than dismembering. Against single or few necromorphs this could stand, but if being overrun by such immense numbers, this couldn't stand a chance.

In addition to the above point, the massive Necromorph swarm was spearheaded by the Ubermorph, which is invincible. The marines would have lost if that one had sauntered in alone.

Subverted in the first mission of Command & Conquer: Renegade. A GDI convoy is ambushed, but with the help of a commando (the player), all the ambushers are killed.

A mission in War Craft III: The Frozen Throne has Kael defending a Draenei village from Fel Orcs. The Draenei return the favor by allying with Kael.

The Hyrulian guards in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Despite being heavily armed they are completely outclassed by the shadow beasts (the same goes for most of the NPCs) and most of them are actually shaking with fear during the encounter. The fact that Zant himself enter minutes later does not help their odds.

The BSAA troops in Resident Evil 5 actually do put up a decent fight when onscreen, but offscreen they tend to get surprised and slaughtered by boss monsters - except for those poor bastards in the marshlands, who are killed by the Majini.

The U.B.C.S. in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis don't put up much of a fight, unless they were named. Somewhat justified, as Umbrella intended for them to fail so that the Supervisors could collect data on how their monsters fared against trained soldiers. The SWAT team from the start also counts.

Hunk aka Mr Death, a gas mask soldier who works for the Umbrella Special Forces unit always lives no matter what he's up against while everyone else on his team dies because "You can't kill Death"

S.T.A.R.S. from the original game. By the time Alpha Team reached the mansion, one of their own members is already dead (Frost), half of Bravo Team is dead too (Dooley, Dewey, Sullivan, and Speyer), two of the other members were mortally wounded (Aiken and Marini) before they were later killed off as well, and only Chambers (depending on how you play the game) manages to survive with Redfield and Valentine (and Barry Burton if playing as Jill; although Rebecca doesn't appear in that scenario, they all survive according to Word of God).

In Resident Evil 6, The BSAA squad led by Chris Redfield pretty much counts during one part of the China level. They're hunting down a gigantic viper that can turn invisible at will. The squad, while marginally helpful up until now, begins helplessly dying off one by one. Some of them even need to be bailed out, but will still bite the dust at some point. In fact, they pretty much exist for the sole purpose of making the snake boss seem all that much more intimidating. Only one squad member survives the ordeal, only to be killed by Ada/Carla a little bit later.

Longbow in City of Heroes are a paramilitary group who actually wear red, and white. Established by a superhero (the granddaughter of the setting's Superman equivalent), their costumes and ethos are styled after four-color superheroes, and they even use similar weapons and powers. They're the most common enemy in City of Villains, to the annoyance of the player base.

In the X-COM games, you start out with a team of these. Expect casualties.

It gets worse. If you ever lose one of your trained and effective soldiers (and it will happen), you get to replace him or her with...Ricky Redshirt. An expected and encouraged use of your forces is as follows: trained soldiers in the back, tanks (don't improve and are always the same stats) in the middle to take any explosive damage, and Ricky Redshirts in the front, to die repeatedly.

Save Scumming also works, although it's made more annoying that you can save but not load in Battlescape.

In Paradox Interactive games, you can make your own Red Shirt armies—just focus on sheer weight of numbers while ignoring technological advantages or leadership. You can also be on the other end: an advanced, disciplined army will usually kill dozens to hundreds times more soldiers than it will lose.

In Kane and Lynch, your named teammates (Lynch, Thapa, Rific and Shelly) are surprisingly not a Red Shirt Army. You'll rely on them a lot, and they can take a lot of fire before they go down. However, in the civil war level 'Freedom Fighters', Lynch, Thapa, Rific and Shelly each get their OWN squad of four men to command, which all die after one shot.

The entire point of Mount & Blade is to raise one and have them fight the armies of everyone opposed to your kingdom. Or just everyone, if you feel like being a total sociopath.

Ace Combat regularly has the PC flying alongside allied squadrons, but while they do get the occasional kill in they still are considerably less capable than you are. Averted in Ace Combat 6, where your allies will actually attack the enemies to great effect if you order them to.

Bravo Team in Doom 3 gets wiped out before you even find them. Except for one, who is picked off by a Wraith shortly after you meet him.

In 6 Days a Sacrifice, the final game in the Chzo Mythos, Theo has an unending supply of Trilby clones to protect him.

Valkyria Chronicles has the entire Gallian army. Whenever something needs to be blown up to prove what dire straits we're in, it's the army, and eventually the whole thing gets blown up at Ghirlandaio. No one cares because the army is a bunch of faceless, unsympathetic mooks even to the heroes, and the core group of Squad 7 is more worried that Alicia is capable of an explosion like that than the deaths of some thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people.

Queen Deirdranna of Jagged Alliance 2 uses an actual army wearing red shirts. On high difficulty levels you get to kill hundreds of them. That is, until the ''Black Shirt'' elites show up!

The Total War series is bad about this. Rome: Total War—a game generally considered accurate enough to have been used in several actual documentaries—is a particularly major offender, drawing complaints from historians about the ludicrous amount of mutual bloodshed in the typical battle, and the fact that nobody really bats an eye if you go out and lose 75% of your army in a "close victory."

Metal Wolf Chaos has the Resistance forces, whose sole skill is "thorough knowledge of how to escape" helicopters that have been shot down. Note, please, that the only reason the helicopters are being shot down is because they are being deliberately piloted into missiles.

The regular United States Marines during the mission High Value Target could be counted as a redshirt army, given that no matter what, every single one of them dies during or immediately following the ambush.

Happens in several Guild Wars missions. On a story level scale, in the consulate docks mission. The sunspears easily defeat the regular Kournan army, but then are killed in a cutscene by Varesh's demons, leaving the players to continue the story on their own.

Lampshaded in Starcraft II with one of the Marines' annoyed lines: "Has anyone else noticed how no one seems to come back IN to the barracks?

Also used in the story of Starcraft: Arcturus Mengsk sends Sarah Kerrigan and a large group of soldiers to a suicide mission to cover his ass. Jim Raynor spends the rest of the franchise on a vendetta for what Mengsk did to Kerrigan, and none of the redshirts with her are ever mentioned.

Completely averted in Blue Dragon. While it at first looks like a classic scene where a Curbstomp Battle is about to occur between the Jibral Military and the Big Bad Nene, the Jibral Military proves itself extremely competent and actually routs Nene's ship and forces him to retreat without any noted casualties. They are so good, in fact, that you feel safe leaving your village in their hands.

Fallout 3 has the Brotherhood of Steel Initiates play the part, justified, not just because they're initiates, (Usually initiates are born into the Brotherhood and are very efficient by adulthood) but because they're recruited from (presumably) radiation weakened Wastelanders, who are untrained, and can hardly hold their own against the mutated creatures of the waste, much less the Pure strain, highly trained, descended from U.S. military Enclave soldiers Might be played straight with the more experienced Knights and Paladins depending on the difficulty level, and what kind of enemies they're fighting.

Fallout 4 has the Commonwealth Minutemen: the Brotherhood from 3 return as the game's Badass Army. Minutemen are stated to be citizen-soldiers who take up weapons to defend their small settlements from threats, and it shows from their equipment: they can be packing crude pipe guns and wearing rags and baseball gear for protection, to wielding Laser Muskets and clad in metal body armour, and anything in between. You can call in a squad of Minutemen reinforcements with the flare gun you receive from Preston Garvey early on, but because of their kitbashed equipment and low level, they usually just present something for your foes to shoot at other than you, and mostly die in droves. Absolutely Averted if you lead them to victory against the Institute, as post-ending the Minutemen will start patrolling the roads and taking up positions in checkpoints as well as Diamond City, and they're much better trained and equipped: they'll mow down Gunners and Raiders with little trouble and can even give Deathclaws the fight of their lives.

A damn near literal example in Fable III: When you're fighting against Logan's army in the (first) Battle of Bowerstone, the guys on your side that aren't named are an army of guards wearing red shirts. They don't have names. They're just there to shoot the purple-coated guards and get killed.

While NPCs have varying degrees of effectiveness in Dragon Age: Origins, the cutscene where the Warden encounters the Archdemon atop Fort Drakon plays this trope straight, as a company of soliders is fighting the dragon just as you appear on the scene. The dragon quickly disposes of them all, leaving you to face it alone (barring any troops you may summon).

Much of Origins plot revolves around the player trying to gather forces to replace the one lost at Ostagar after Loghain's betrayal handed victory to the Darkspawn. Whether or not they would have won had Loghain played his part is debatable -While King Cailan was sure they could win, Loghain thought defeat was so certain it was better to cut his losses and escape with his army intact. Duncan was less confident about the battle than Cailan, but seemed to agree with his decision to fight nonetheless.

It was mentioned before the battle that the army had already won three major battles against the darkspawn, so the plan quite possibly would have worked. Considering that in the final battle the darkspawn start retreating once you kill the Archdemon, that probably was the plan; make the battle enough of an impending loss that the Archdemon itself would have had to intervene, where it would be engaged by the Grey Wardens among the army.

Apart from Alistair, the general value of Templars in Ferelden ranges from "utterly useless" to "more harm than good" - despite having trained to kill abominations, maleficarum, and demons, the Templar garrison in the Circle Tower exists mostly to die and/or become possessed when things go to hell, meaning that when the Warden actually comes through to kill everything that moves, the only Templars who influence your success in any way are the ones who are being used as body gloves by demons and so are opposing you.

In L.A. Noire, you are frequently aided in shootouts by uniformed LAPD officers. While your plainclothes partners are invulnerable, the unis are not, and will often be gunned down in the first 30 seconds.

In Making History II, militia units have just as many soldiers as regular military divisions, but are extremely weak, and will get massacred by the thousands against well-trained and equipped armies.

The Mooks of the Dynasty Warriors: Gundam games are pathetically weak, and exist only to get killed in massive droves by the Aces of each team. They can very occasionally capture enemy fields or even take down Aces, but generally only if said field/Ace has been severely weakened first.

In the first Majesty, this would be the definition of your henchmen. They do their jobs with no concern for self-preservation. Two of the three guard henchmen, city and palace guards, even come dressed in red. The other guard, the veteran guards in blue, can replace city guards. They serve little actual combat purpose other than the occasional kill, being distractions for heroes, and not costing anything to replace if (or when) they die.

In [PROTOTYPE] the Elite Mooks Blackwatch set up to have the marines be this, expecting them to be killed off by the thousands each week. Though in a Give The Dog A Bone twist, they were given the full credit for saving the people of New York from the outbreak.

With a few exceptions, every single soldier and generic officer in Dynasty Warriors is there to get wiped out by the non-generic ones.

Beyond Good & Evil has the events of the game leading to a civil uprising only to have it be a trap that kills off everyone.

Mostly played straight in the Silent Storm games, whenever you have NPC allies. However, this is usually because the enemy (governed by the same AI) has better weapons and more numbers. Several early missions in the first game involve you coming upon a battle between the Allies and the Axis. If you do nothing, your side loses, but they also take a fair number of the enemy troops with them. Additionally, one of the final missions in Silent Storm Sentinels has you defending you base from heavily-armed THO troops, some of whom are wearing Panzerkleins. Despite the base having trenches with machinegun emplacements and a number of friendly troops in advantageous positions, they ''will' get slaughtered, leaving it all up to your squad (who also should have Panzerkleins by that point). Especially since small arms do no damage to Panzerkleins, and the friendlies are likely to have few to no heavier arms like bazookas. Oh, and the guy in charge of the assault is wearing a Panzerklein armed with energy guns that slice through other Panzerkleins like butter.

In M.U.S.H.A., four out of five on the MUSHA team get shot down in the opening, leaving only the heroine.

G.U.N. in Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog. On one hand, you got the basic robotic mooks, easily taken down by spin attacks. On the other, you have the actual humans who are competent enough to capture the world's (naturally) fastest hedgehog twice. In Shadow, though, it's not uncommon for the Ultimate Lifeform to have to go save a few along the way.

The Army Men Franchise has a particular habit of doing this. In the original top down game, which were more Strategy than shooter, all of your units save for your starting squad generally had the same stats as the enemy, so friendly paratroopers died of quickly. In the Sarge's Heroes games, allied units could be found on the map, particularly in the first mission of the first game, but they usually got killed. If you saved them, they just ran off to stand by some boxes somewhere.

In Sengoku Basara friendly camps occasionally spawn units of your own troops to defend them from enemy mooks. They're even less useful than said mooks as they'll automatically lose against anyone with a name, including enemy mooks with a named squad leader, and won't even damage enemy bosses if they show up to the boss fight.

In Transformers: War for Cybertron and its sequel Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, both the Autobot and Decepticon factions have endless waves of generic unnamed members whose sole purpose seems to be to get slaughtered by the dozens by the named (usually playable) characters on the other faction. There are several times in both games where you are accompanied by whole squads of redshirts from the faction you're currently playing who almost invariably fail to survive until the end of that level.

When playing as a 'con you get to kill droves of Protectobots, and when playing as a 'bot you get to see droves of them already dead while passing through most levels. Most of them are painted in red. And if that seems like a coincidence, the strongest basic soldiers come in blue and gold.

Ever since Warner Brothers bought out the Mortal Kombat series, there's been a stronger focus on story for Mortal Kombat 9 and Mortal Kombat X. Since these games now feature several invasion storylines, Earthrealm has its own Special Forces army, and Kotal Kahn has his masked legions—both are basically ineffective against the demonic armies of Netherrealm, let alone any of the Kombatants. Even the weakened Quan Chi and his small cadre of revenants still kill them off easily. The assassin clans of the Lin Kuei and Shirai Ryu fare better—even their nameless generic members are extremely competent and equally dangerous in the storyline.

Earth's military in War of the Monsters stand no chance for the monsters, who are seen casually destroying tanks and helicopters in cutscenes.

Web Animation

In Ultra Fast Pony, the allegedly elite squad of military pegasi are (initially) known as the Ineffectual Flight Team, and they're every bit as good as their name implies. Several episodes later, they reappear with the new title of Super Effective Flight Team. Unfortunately, "Changing their name did nothing to help their ability to fly!"

Web Comics

In Goblins, they wipe out part of an army by using a shield that triggers random major magic effects whenever it's hit. [1] This tends to subvert the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy in that the redshirts that do hit are probably doomed while those who miss may live, or perhaps the goblin is doing a redshirt-type act, as in the background it hints at the word "redshirt" not "redshirts" — which reminds long timers that the shield is random enough to backfire killing the goblin, upgrading the enemies, summoning weird dangerous stuff, or worse.

In Homestuck, the pawns serving both armies on the Skaian battlefield are examples of this.

"'A Foot Soldier's Guide to Combat'

most of the diagrams in this book involve a soldier advancing by a single tile, either straight ahead, or diagonally when lunging with a weapon.

Averted where the Azure City Army gives a damn good accounting of itself. Yes, they lose but they take a lot of Mooks with them and manage a fighting retreat in good order.

Played for Laughs with Tarquin's forces from the Empire of Blood. He has an entire army surround the heroes for no other reason than to provide dramatic tension, though they're also trained in plot-critical reveals.

Random Soldier: General Tarquin has been in control of the empire the whole time! Tarquin: Yes, yes, we did that one already.

Sidekicks: Whenever the Under Corps are lending their help in a major crisis, they turn into this.

Western Animation

Actually averted in Avatar: The Last Airbender, where Zuko voices out against sending in a team of right out of training cadets into battle to be used as a diversion in the war. However it was this action that prompted his father to scar his face and banish him in the first place. Played straight almost all the time, to show the heroes/villains as prodigies, or tougher than the norm. The Heroes commonly go off against greater odds (like the earth kingdom palace guard) and come out on top, the entire Earth Kingdom army failed to stop the Fire Nation Invasion, and an elite team all went down against Ty Lee. During the Seige of the North Pole, this trope was combined with mooks, during the day, the (sun-empowered) Fire-nation began defeating Water Benders left and right, during the night, the (moon-empowered) water benders beat them with ease.

The CDF troops in Iron Kid are a prime example. When their general tells them to guard his defeated foe (who was a VERY dangerous villain), you just know how this will end....

If you thought it was going to end with "Villain wakes up, pounds the troops, then runs." then you would be wrong. It was more: "New guy pounds the troops, takes other villain and runs." To make it more embarrassing, said new guy was just a normal Flying Mook.

In Exo Squad, the other exosquads are treated like this. Especially Baker Squad. In early episodes, the Jumptroopers were also treated this way, but once the Charlie-Fives show up, this ceases.

Futurama. Suicidal redshirt charges are the only page in Zapp Brannigan's playbook.

Zapp Brannigan: Stop exploding, you cowards!

Brannigan even brags about how he defeated an army of killbots by sending wave after wave of redshirts at them until the killbots exceeded their kill limit.

In "Into the Wild Green Yonder"

Zapp: We made it through, Kif. How many men did we lose?

Kif: All of them.

Zapp: Well, at least they won't have to mourn each other.

Generator Rex Zig-Zags this. On one occasion they failed to take on a gang, armed with Crossbows and the element of surprise note more advance weapons were used to take out the air support, but weren't used after that. When stuck in the Bug Jar, Calan and 4 others (two masked, two unmasked) stand by the heroes and fight off the enemies admirably. During the attack on the base, they're taken down, but by the end of the episode, they regroup to fight off the enemy Mooks. Most of the time, they just shoot ineffectively at the monster and the heroes save the day.

In Star Wars: Clone Wars, when Anakin Skywalker takes off alone to chase an enemy Force-user, Obi-Wan orders a squadron of clone troopers to follow him and save him from getting himself killed. When the clones arrive, they proceed to split up and get wiped out over the course of about three minutes, without ever seeing the enemy. Amusingly enough, clone troopers are the predecessors of storm troopers, perhaps indicating that the trope is inheritable.

Averted in Superman: The Animated Series in the episode "Apokolips...Now!" The well-equipped and well-trained Metropolis Police fend off the storm troops of an extraterrestrial invasion all by themselves with no help from Supes at all. They also had to act without any help from the military, the local base having been destroyed in an earlier pre-invasion attack.

The Enforcers in SWAT Kats serve as nothing more than mere cannon fodder against the Villain Of The Week before the titular characters swoop in to save the day.

Averted in The Venture Bros.. The OSI's grunts are stunningly effective at slaughtering villainous henchmen. In fact, they seem to enjoy it a little too much.

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